Theistic Evolution

A Scientific, Philosophical, and Theological Critique

J. P. Moreland, Stephen C. Meyer, Christopher Shaw, Ann K. Gauger, Wayne Grudem

• Publisher: Crossway
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781433552892
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

Many prominent Christians insist that the church must yield to contemporary evolutionary theory and therefore modify traditional biblical ideas about the creation of life. They argue that God used—albeit in an undetectable way—evolutionary mechanisms to produce all forms of life. Featuring two dozen highly credentialed scientists, philosophers, and theologians from Europe and North America, this volume contests this proposal, documenting evidential, logical, and theological problems with theistic evolution—making it the most comprehensive critique of theistic evolution yet produced.

Section I, Part 1

. . . . .

The Failure of Neo-Darwinism

1

Three Good Reasons for People of Faith to Reject Darwin’s Explanation of Life

Douglas D. Axe

SUMMARY

People of faith should reject the call to affirm the Darwinian explanation of life and should instead affirm the traditional understanding of divine creative action, which defies reduction to natural causes. There are three good reasons for this. (1) Acceptance of Darwinism carries a substantial apologetic cost. Specifically, if Darwin was right that life can be explained by accidental physical causes, then we must forfeit the claim that all humans are confronted by God’s existence when we behold the wonders of the living world. (2) All accidental explanations of life, whether Darwinian or not, are demonstrably implausible. (3) The common justifications for accommodating Darwin’s theory within the framework of traditional faith are confused.

. . . . .

I. First Things First

You’ve heard the claim that natural selection acting upon random genetic mutations created all life from a primitive life form. In the century and a half since Darwin gave that idea its beginning, few claims have generated more controversy. How should people of faith respond to this controversy?

Two questions immediately present themselves:

1. Is Darwin’s claim correct?

2. What would the implications for our faith be if it were correct?

Now, because many people think the answer to question 1 requires technical expertise, there’s a tendency to answer it by proxy—choosing to side with experts in either the yes camp or the no camp and then entrusting the defense of that answer to those experts. As understandable as this is in some respects, I advise against it, for several reasons.

In the first place, there is widespread confusion even as to who the relevant experts are. Nonscientists tend to be so acutely aware of their lack of expertise that they defer to anyone with a science degree, most of whom have no more familiarity with the technical critique of Darwinism than anyone else. Indeed, because even highly accomplished biology professors are accomplished only within their narrow fields of specialization, it takes a certain amount of scientific familiarity just to discern who can really speak to the subject of biological origins from scientific experience.

Keith Fox and I have engaged in friendly debate on that subject, so I hope he won’t mind me using him as an example. As a biochemistry professor at the University of Southampton in the UK, Fox is an established expert on how various molecules bind to DNA. Having done no research on that subject, I’m obviously in no position to critique his work. Likewise, having done no work on protein evolution, he is really in no position to critique my work. And in a professional context he wouldn’t pretend otherwise. However, the origins topic has attracted such a wide following that most debate on the subject occurs at the popular level, and as the associate director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion, Fox understandably wants to speak to that debate. He should speak to it, but the listening public would benefit from knowing that he does so as a nonexpert.

For instance, based on my research, I claim that enzymes (the protein molecules that do life’s chemistry) cannot be invented by any accidental evolutionary process. Life as we see it depends on highly proficient enzymes, all built within cells by linking many amino acids (typically hundreds) together in precise sequence. These special sequences enable the long chains of linked amino acids to fold up into complex, function-specific structures. In criticizing my claim that evolution cannot explain the origin of enzymes, Fox has repeated the standard idea that evolution builds gradually from small beginnings. According to him, weak enzyme function can be produced by linking a mere two amino acids together, and this can serve as an evolutionary starting point. From there, natural selection can build the exquisite enzymes we see in life, he thinks. In his words: “One doesn’t have to start with an unlikely polypeptide [i.e., amino-acid chain] with billion-fold activity, but from (say) a specific dipeptide (of which there are only 400 using the natural amino acids), with a few-fold improvement.”1

There’s a serious problem here, though most people need help to see it. Scientists who know about enzymes and the various attempts to use selection to enhance them would never join Fox in this claim, for one good reason: they know they can’t back it up! Fox was hazarding a wild guess that, for reasons I explained elsewhere,2 happened to be wildly wrong. Of course, had he openly called it a wild guess, there would be no cause for concern. Wrong guesses are harmless, provided we know they are only guesses. But when people of Fox’s scientific stature pull scientific claims out of thin air without saying so, people naturally take these claims more seriously than they should. That is a cause for concern.

The second problem with seeing question 1 as an experts-only question is that when you stop to realize how much is at stake here, the thought of handing authority over such crucial matters to scientific experts ought to be unsettling. It’s also completely unnecessary. I’ve argued at length that the failure of Darwin’s explanation of life is a commonsense fact—a plain truth testified to by our strong intuition that life is designed, and by a lifetime of experience that confirms this intuition.3 To resolve the tension between what our intuition tells us and what the evolutionary textbooks tell us, then, we should begin by recognizing that we’re all fully qualified to participate in the debate over our origin.

The third problem with leaving the evaluation of Darwin’s claim to the experts is that this tempts us to skip straight to question 2—the question of how his claim, if true, should impact our faith. No matter how provisionally we make this move, the very fact that we’ve done so implicitly conveys a yes answer to the question of whether his claim really is true (question 1). After all, question 2 isn’t even worth asking unless question 1 has been answered in the affirmative.

In Where the Conflict Really Lies, philosopher Alvin Plantinga proceeds to question 2 as carefully as anyone can, I think, and yet not without creating a problem. His first chapter—“Evolution and Christian Belief”—summarizes his critique of Richard Dawkins’s defense of Darwinism in The Blind Watchmaker as follows:

Dawkins claims that the living world came to be by way of unguided evolution. . . . What he actually argues, however, is that there is a Darwinian series for contemporary life forms. As we have seen, this argument is inconclusive; but even if it were air-tight it wouldn’t show, of course, that the living world, let alone the entire universe, is without design. At best it would show, given a couple of assumptions, that it is not astronomically improbable that the living world was produced by unguided evolution and hence without design.4

Notice that, from the vantage point of faith, the word best in Plantinga’s final sentence should be read as worst. That is, Plantinga tells us that at worst Dawkins has shown there is at least a slim chance that we are cosmic accidents.

I suppose Plantinga’s conclusion would sound like good news to anyone who wor...